Products or items, such as and without limitation vehicles, are typically produced or created within a manufacturing plant or facility. The produced products are then typically driven or placed within a temporary storage yard or facility where they are selectively placed upon a railcar or other type of transport carrier or conveyance for shipment to a dealer or customer. Oftentimes, no record is kept of the initial location of each of these items within the yard. Further, no record is typically kept of the various locations that these items are respectively and later moved to or driven to within the yard, as new items are received. Hence, a manual search of the entire yard must usually be made in order to locate a particular item, should the item require service or repair prior to shipment.
Sometimes a plant or manufacturing facility will discover that previously manufactured items, including those items or products which have been placed within the storage yard for shipment, have an undesirable attribute or characteristic that must or should be corrected or repaired. Due to the relatively high cost of notifying customers of these needed modifications and the relatively high cost of having a dealer or other third party make these needed modifications, it is highly desirable to make these modifications to the products before they are shipped from the yard.
In the past, upon the discovery of such an undesirable attribute or characteristic, shipment from the yard was interrupted and/or stopped while the yard was manually searched for the items which were to be modified. Such an interruption caused an undesirable delay in shipping products, disrupted the entire product shipping schedule, and increased overall production cost, as the plant production schedule was similarly disrupted.
There is therefore a need for a method for maintaining the quality of manufactured items or products in a manner which overcomes at least some of the drawbacks of the previously delineated methods and for “containing” and rectifying undesirable attributes and/or characteristics of products before they are transported to customers and/or dealers of a business enterprise.